Martha Wells

My Flying Lizard Circus

(no subject)

January 14th, 2011

I got very good news yesterday. The Cloud Roads got a starred review from Publishers Weekly. I'm very happy and also really relieved. You can't see it on the site yet unless you register, but the quote sentence is:Wells (The Gate of Gods) merrily ignores genre conventions as she spins an exciting adventure around an alien hero who anyone can identify with.

I'll post the rest below and cut it because it's a bit spoilery:Moon's world is populated by many different intelligent species (none of them human), and he has never known which one he belongs to. Orphaned at a young age, he's wandered from tribe to tribe, hiding a dangerous secret. Like the universally hated Fell, whose only aims are slaughter and conquest, Moon can fly--which leads to predictably violent cases of mistaken identity. When he does find his own people, the Raksura, life doesn't get any easier, since their internal politics are vicious, and they too are in imminent danger from the Fell. Cue hairsbreadth escapes and feats of derring-do, as Moon helps his new family evacuate their doomed colony and then rescues a group of kidnapped children. Wells (The Gate of Gods) merrily ignores genre conventions as she spins an exciting adventure around an alien hero who anyone can identify with. (Mar.)

Last night for dinner I made chicken in an onion and green chili sauce, and it was yummy.

Poor health did not prevent Hammett from becoming deeply entrenched in political activity. In the 1930s, when not writing or delving into investigative intrigue, Hammett spend much of his time involved in the anti-fascist movement. Devout in his beliefs, part of the reason for Hammett's separation from the Pinkerton Agency was his disapproval of the agency's anti-union stance. Hammett's beliefs, vocal denunciation of Nazism, membership of the Communist Party and eventual role as vice-chairman of the deemed-subversive Civil Rights Congress (CRC) was noticed by the authorities. In the late 1940s and early ‘50s, his activities were highlighted as ‘un-American’ under Senator Joseph McCarthy's reign of anti-communist hysteria. In 1951, the author was imprisoned on contempt charges for six months after he refused to testify against four fellow communists in a conspiracy trial for whom the CRC had posted bail.

And yes, that Cracked article is hilarious. I already just about lost it at "If you took a child with three days of martial arts training and somehow convinced them that the only noun in the entire world was penis, this is what that poor monster would create," and then I got to the "Looking Forward to Being Attacked" book...